Six paradoxes in managing creativity: An embracing act

Initiating and sustaining creativity in the workplace is a delicate and difficult process and often commercial pressures do not make it any easier. This article aims to identify the practical tensions, mixed messages and oppositions that characterise the management of organisational creativity. It explores how three successful creative organisations embrace the paradoxes resulting from these tensions. The case studies illustrate six key paradoxes in managing organisational creativity. Success lies in acknowledging the interdependency of the contradictory tensions involved in these six paradoxes rather than in treating these tensions as separate phenomena. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.